Note that there aren't many aboriginal American in D.C. and there aren't many African Americans in the part of Texas Perry is from. So we change the name of Perry's ranch to Indianhead and we change the name of the Skins to the Washington...(This was suggested before btw.)

It used to be that the ginned up controversies from the left could actually resonate. This one just reeks of desperation. You'd think they would have waited to see if Perry won the nomination before reporting this bombshell.

Yes, it's terrible that Perry visited a place that has a nasty word on a rock!! He is a terrible person. If he'd only approved the selling of automatic weapons to a drug cartel that murdered US citizens...that, I'd be cool with.

Both names -- that rock in Texas and that football team in Washington -- represent a long tradition with people embedded in it who casually, complacently believe the name isn't actually nasty, that it's somehow gotten processed into something innocuous.

The question whether the name is bad and should be changed is separate from the question of the extent to which the people who have been accepting it are morally impaired.

Speaking only for and about myuself, my great-aunt and -uncle bought in 1962 a house out in Orient, NY, way out on the North Fork (don't believe the NYT crap about how delectable it is out there. Blackflies as big as Buicks!) of Long Island, just west of Orient Point. (If Hannibal Lecter had been sent to Plum Island we could have thrown rocks at him from there.)

Now, I understand that "Oriental" is out of currency to describe East Asians. Don't understand it, but I heard that somewhere. So, since we've been summering out there for oh all my life and then some, and nobody has changed the name yet, am I in trouble should I run for office?

J, here's your relevant Mencken quote for the day: This story is "boob bait for suckers."

"But to this day Texans, who do the same thing to the Hispanics, distinguish their State from Georgia by referring to Atlanta as N---er Town."

I've been Texan since birth, and I have never heard that term a single time. I've hardly ever encountered racism from adults in Texas. Kids do it a bit, but adults largely don't.

There are rare exceptions, but the idea Texas is a racist place is stupid.

I haven't heard the N word ever since I was last in St Louis. I don't think I've heard that word in Texas since 1991, and then from a ten year old disturbed boy who is now in prison.

Cain is not actually being authentic here. His knew jerk assumptions about Perry on this and on border security show Cain is not good at being well informed of the facts, and he shoots too early on this stuff.

Either that, or he's just trying to get Romney nominated. Cain's obvious preference for Romney is just plain bizarre to me. If Cain is an authentic conservative, why support Romney over Perry?

STL is a hotbed of racial tension, but, frankly, show me a major metro that isn't. Then show me one that doesn't have unsupervised light rail making two stops in East Saint Louis before heading downtown and into the bar/nightclub/yuppie/shopping districts.

I'll go on record as another Texan who has no idea what "traditionalguy" is talking about. I've heard Atlanta referred to as, well, "Atlanta" and occasionally "Hotlanta", but never with the epithet used by "traditionalguy".

And I'll also agree with DaveW. That word just isn't (and wasn't) used in polite company in my 40+ years here. If you *do* hear it, you can reasonably assume that the user either him/herself black, or you're dealing with an uneducated loser.

Add my name to the list as well. Life long Texan here. Never have I heard anyone refer to Atlanta as anything other than Atlanta. What I find interesting about people, who try to claim Texans or Southerners are racists, is the bigotry in making the claim. When Texans feel the need to distinguish Georgia from Texas, they start with a map. I'm afraid a map maybe a bit complicated for Tradguy.

TQN: "There's Nigger Bay, which lies between Swan Island and Currituck Banks in northeast Currituck County. Nigger Head, a mountain on the Clay-Macon County line, climbs to 4,900 ft. Niggerhead Creek rises in east Union County and flows into northwest Richardson Creek. Nigger Mountain, also known by its proper name, Mount Jefferson, is in Ashe County. Niggerskull Creek rises in central Jackson County and flows southwest into Tuckasegee River. And there is Nigger Skull Mountain (not to be confused with Niggerskull Mountiain) in west Haywood County on the head of East Fork. Niggerskull Mountain (for Nigger Skull Mountain, see above) is in central Jackson County between Niggerskull Creek and Gladie Creek. Nigger Spring, in south Haywood County, feeds into the Little East Fork Pigeon River."

Barack Obama has been living in this country not doing a fucking thing about it.

So he must be a racist, since he's allowing all these Nigger places to continue to exist without even once asking that their names be changed. He can't not have known about this. These places are printed on all the maps. Man's seen a map, hasn't he?

When I was hopping freight ships in the 60s and 70s, there were two kinds of wenches--niggerheads and gypsy heads. The names were used matter-of-factly even by blacks in the deck crew, and by me even though I was big on civil rights. Nothing invidious about the terms at the time; I always assumed they were references to Moroccan and Egyptian headwear.

Lenny Bruce: "It's the suppression of the word nigger that gives it the power, the violence the viciousness, dig? If President Obama would just go on television and say "I'd like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet ..." and if he'd just say nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger nigger to every nigger he saw; boogy boogy, boogy, boogy boogy, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger till "nigger" didn't mean anything any more ... then you'd never be able to make some 6-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school."

See ... the Democrats WANT the word NIGGER to be violent and vicious. Barack Obama WANTS that 6-year-old child to HURT when somebody calls him a nigger at school. He likes hurting children if it advances his political goals.

And that's why Lenny Bruch said the Democrats (home of the KKK's Robert Byrd remember) want to suppress this word.

FWIW, shouldn't they be called the Washington Blackskins? Might endear these losers to their natural fan base, assuming demographics have anything to do with it. OTOH, given what Washington has "done" for/to Indians since before the Constitution, maybe the name is appropriate--based on 'counting coup' or scalps, heh.

I am so sick of this bullshit. Redskins have a racial component but they are not racist like some terms are and it is certainly not used in a perjoritive manner (hell the Indians baseball team mascot is arguably more racist than the term "Redskin" but about equal with the Notre Dame midget). It is perfectly okay to call Caucasians anything you want. I just do not care anymore. Someone calls someone the n-word, kick their ass but beyond that shut up.

STL is a hotbed of racial tension, but, frankly, show me a major metro that isn't.

Houston, outside of the eighth congressional district offices at least; the only thing H-town is a hotbed of is humidity, and precious little of that this year (and yes Houston is a major metro, 4th largest in the nation...funny all those rednecks even elected an openly lesbian mayor, doesn't really fit the narrative does it?)

As a lifelong Texan, I can honestly say that the only time I have ever heard a white person call a black person the N-word in public was in the liberal bastion of New Haven, CT while I was in law school. There will always be people in the South who use it, but it amazes me that the people who traffic in this crap forget that the North has a very checkered history re: race and racism exists throughout the North as well.

I grew up in TX, raised a bi-racial child in TX and NEVER heard the word in any polite or regular conversation...although once we moved to KS it was a different story as far as my son being called that name.

I'm from Calgary, AB Canada, and west of town, on the way to beautiful Banff in the Canadian Rockies, was a mountain called "Chinaman's Peak". I say "was" because it's now called something more PC. the story is that when the Canadian Pacific was building the railroad across the west, a group of workers (non-unionized) bet a gentleman of Chinese origin that he couldn't climb the mountain. He took the bet and proved them wrong. CP named much of the West, and thus the mountain becmae Chinaman's PEak. It was changed recently to reflect the actual name of the man who climbed it, Ha Ling. Nevertheless, to those of us who grew up there, it will always be Chinamans' Peak.

This is not a racist nomenclature. The man was from China, therefore a Chinaman. There is another hill in Calgary called Scotsman's Bluff, which no one has yet objected to. When I was a wee lad, the corner "mini-mart" was always owned by a Chinese family. Hence we were going to the Chinaman's store when we went for sodas and candy.

I now live in the Southeast and do business in Atlanta. I have never heard it referred to a "N-town". Never. And when in Texas, I have only heard the word used once in 12 years, and the speaker was told to never use the word again if they wanted to keep their job.

The Missus is a grad of U. North Dakota, home of the Fighting Sioux. That was a name the local Sioux were proud of, and couldn't understand why the pantywaist badminton and field hockey coaches of the NCAA informed them it was racist.

The Missus is a grad of U. North Dakota, home of the Fighting Sioux. That was a name the local Sioux were proud of, and couldn't understand why the pantywaist badminton and field hockey coaches of the NCAA informed them it was racist.

I grew up in NYC. I left for college (the U.S. Air Force Academy) in 1983. After the Academy, I've lived in Sacramento, Biloxi, Little Rock, Tokyo, and Maryland. I've only been called "nigger" to my face in one of the locations I've lived. Guess which one?

NYC.

I've only been harassed by store security in one of those locations. Guess...

NYC.

So experience has taught me that the stereotypes about the South are just that. Stereotypes.

Wow, great thread. I grew up in Texas and my 2¢ is that it's a big state. I've never heard Atlanta described by the epithet traditionalguy used. The middle class white folks whom I have heard using the N word have used it solely because it is transgressive -- and these folks are in a distinctly small minority, which is how they know they're being transgressive. I've used the word in a hapless attempt to equate "white trash" with the equivalent underclass of African Americans, but the nomenclature doesn't really work because of the hypersensitivity to the N word.

Ironically enough, my early years were spent in Hawaii (yes, I have two real birth certificates), where racial classifications are almost meaningless. (I'm not sure where Obama got his deck of race cards, but it wasn't in Hawaii.) It was a strange adjustment to Texas in the '60's when we moved to San Antonio. Texans in that era were certainly not color-blind, but there were more momentous divides in my elementary school -- like the polarity between "kickers" and "surfers" ;-) By the time the '70's rolled around, political correctness -- of the mild kind most folks think of as just being polite -- was starting to take hold. By the '80's, Texas was as much, if not more, devoid of racism as any part of the country. At least from my myopic viewpoint.

Oh, and FWIW, I'm half Japanese, and I've never understood the sensitivity to the word "Oriental"... it doesn't bother me. I've known people to use the pejorative "Jap", which does get under my skin a bit -- but not in the last thirty years. The last guy I knew who called me that was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, so I cut him some slack. He was a swell guy in other respects so we got along fine.

I recall a story that made the news some years back about a stewardess, er, flight attendant who got in trouble for using "eenie, meenie, minie, moe..." in a (not quite) lighthearted attempt to select a passenger to be bumped for overbooking. Apparently one of the black ladies in line was insulted. The poor flight attendant had no idea what the lady was upset about because she had only ever heard the cleaned-up version now taught in elementary school, in which the N word is replaced by the T word ("tiger")....

I think the NAACP should make an effort to de-empower this word by commercializing it. Just think, of the possibilities. They could license 'Screamin' Nigger Records', Screamin' Nigger Premium Scotch', ' Screamin' Nigger Cognac', 'Screamin' Nigger Blunts and Super Kools', imagine the money they could make and the good they could do with it. They could really cash in on the white wannabes.

This idea came to me today while at a stop light listening to rap music coming from the car next to me.

"I always love when enlightened white folks tell us what we should be offended over. Without them we'd never know how to think or what to do."

This. The crux of elitism, and PC is the 'tool' of choice.

The 'thought control' of 'Another Brick in the Wall'.

I was taught that the N-word was unacceptable back in the 60's at a young age. My grandmother referred to filberts (the nut) as 'Ni__ertoes'. Though I did not know exactly why the word/reference was in bad taste, I never forgot the lesson.

I will say that the hypersensitivity towards 'mascot' names such as the 'Indians' or the 'Redskins' is pretty silly. To believe it to be some kind of 'put down' is nonsense. Why would any team/owner agree to have their teamed named in a fashion that would be purposefully derogatory?

Its the same bullshit progressive meme model that claims businesses are bad and that the 'screw over your customers and the environment' model of elitist groupthink make sense.